Republicans across the country are on a crusade to control the voting system in their states in a strong way then they have in the past…
Donald Trump leaned on them to go further…
People are worried about democracy itself….
Democrats are advancing a new voting rights bill in Congress…
Republicans want little to do with the effort ….
Some Democrats are worried that the President, their parties leader will not be decisive about their efforts ….
Biden fought this one before….
He never thought it would come back his way as President in his wildest dreams…
Mr. Biden’s long experience in working across the aisle in the Senate — and his evolution from opponent of school busing to proponent of using the government to address issues of racial equity — taught him crucial lessons about navigating politically combustible civil rights issues.
Yet even with his decades of work on the topic, he faces especially wrenching decisions when it comes to the voting rights legislation. Known as the For the People Act, the bill is the professed No. 1 priority of Democrats this year. It would overhaul the nation’s elections system, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But after passing the House, it hit a wall of Republican opposition in the Senate.
With little likelihood of the measure winning enough Republican support to meet the 60-vote threshold necessary for passage, Mr. Biden now faces a choice: Scale back his ambitions for addressing voting rights or abandon hopes of a bipartisan compromise and instead seek to jam it through on a partisan vote in the equally divided chamber by further rolling back one of the foundations of Senate tradition, the filibuster.
Along with his push for a bipartisan compromise on his infrastructure proposal, it is the clearest choice he has faced yet between his instinct to negotiate and confronting the realities of Senate partisanship in 2021….
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“If you look at the things that have animated him over the past 50 years, this is one,” Ted Kaufman, a former senator from Delaware and a close Biden adviser, said in an interview.
The problem, of course, is that very little about the Senate operates the way it did when Mr. Biden served there. Mr. Biden has also changed. As president, he is no longer the quintessential moderate and has instead embraced the most ambitious progressive agenda of any president in generations.
But, his advisers say, he did not ever foresee that voting rights would become such a divisive issue, or that Democrats would be seeking support for an expansive bill that aimed to beat back some 361 bills in 47 states trying to tighten voting rules.
“I don’t think in his wildest dreams he’d ever thought we’d be talking about these issues at this point in our lives,” Mr. Kaufman said. “He fought this before with Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. It was a recurring theme, but not at this level. This feels much more systemic.”…
image…Credit…Barry Thumma/Associated Press